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Meltwater acquires data extraction spinout Wrapidity

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Meltwater, a global leader in media intelligence, ihas announced the acquisition of  Wrapidity Limited, an artificial intelligence (AI) spinout from this department which uses breakthrough technology to automate data extraction from content on the web. Wrapidity's underlying technology will help Meltwater to improve and scale its industry-leading analytics software and address the volume of data coming from new sources as required for future product generations.

Wrapidity helps businesses get the right data from the web, turning billions of webpages into a highly structured database of relevant data and enabling better search, recommendations and analytics for that business. Based on unique technology at the intersection of artificial intelligence, big data, and web technologies, Wrapidity specialises in collecting millions of records from hundreds of thousands of sources. The company was launched by Oxford University Innovation, the research commercialisation company of Oxford University, in 2015.

Jorn Lyseggen, Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Meltwater, said: “Data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence are areas of strategic importance for Meltwater. Today, we are all drowning in unstructured data, and Meltwater is putting the whole weight of our company behind research efforts to unlock insights buried in the large amount of disparate data types found online.” 

Department of Computer Science Professor Georg Gottlob, Co-Founder of Wrapidity, said: “Instant access to products, places, people and news has changed our lives in the last decade. The same access, but at a much larger scale, is now changing business in ways we can’t even imagine yet. At Wrapidity, we have responded to this by developing a completely new AI-based technology for extracting massive amounts of relevant data from millions of websites.”

Tim Furche, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer added: “Meltwater already monitors and analyses millions of articles per day across several languages. Combining Meltwater’s industry leadership and global footprint with Wrapidity’s advances in AI technology, we will be able to surface more accurate, timely and insightful content for Meltwater’s customers. Jorn and his team were visionaries in developing the software, services and business models to make such external web data usable for internal decision-making. We truly believe that companies of the future will hinge on Outside Insight, and we’re extremely excited to pursue this together.”

Wrapidity joins a growing number of recent acquisitions for the media intelligence pioneer as it continues to ramp up its technological offerings globally, with a focus on data science. Wrapidity’s data science team lead by co-founders Giorgio Orsi and Giovanni Grasso, former members of the Department of Computer Science, is joining Meltwater to that end and is bringing a number of department alumni, including Stefano Ortona and Xiaonan Guo, on board as well. 

Tim Furche
(James Martin Fellow (http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/people/236), Fellow of the Oxford Man Institute)
Giorgio Orsi
(Oxford Martin Fellow)